ACCESSION

Only with Arthur’s death in 1502 did Henry become the heir apparent. And even then it was still possible, a year or two later, for the question of the succession to be discussed in terms which took little account of his chances. Yet by the time Henry VII died in i509, there were no longer any doubts. Even so, Henry came to the throne at an uncertain age. Not yet eighteen, he was clearly an adult, yet had not reached that age of twenty-one at which, under English law, a man became formally capable of managing his lands and his affairs in his own right. For the first few weeks his formidable grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the Tudor matriarch, looked like being the guiding force. But she soon followed her son to the grave, and could do no more than advise her grandson to pay heed to those mostly clerical royal councillors for whom she had the regard of a pious woman vowed to the widow’s life: Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester, and her own spiritual director, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester.

The delicacy of the political situation and the inevitable cautiousness of churchmen were hardly a recipe for dramatic developments. The chronicle of the first years of the reign is therefore, not surprisingly, a tale of the arts of peace, taken up

Henry VIII processes to the opening of parliament, 4 February 1512.

With the joys and festivities of court life. Common law may not have reckoned Henry old enough to manage his own affairs, but the law of the Church reckoned him old enough to marry, and his first move was to fulfil his long engagement to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. About two weeks later, fountains of wine ran for the people of London on 24 June to celebrate the coronation, as the king and queen were crowned together, like a couple in a romance of chivalry. Liberated from his father’s smothering care, Henry threw himself by day into a career of hunting, enlivened at intervals by chivalric displays of jousting. By night, revels and dances were the rule. Edward Hall’s chronicle of the reign tells us how Henry VIII and his companions dressed up as Robin Hood and his Merry Men for some Christmas frolics in 1509. This happy phase of Henry’s long reign came to a climax on New Year’s Day 1511 with the birth of a baby to the royal couple. Better still, it was a boy, Prince Henry. King Henry was so delighted that he made a pilgrimage to Walsingham to give thanks. Tragically, the baby prince was dead within two months and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Catherine’s subsequent pregnancies were less successful. Several miscarried. Only one baby would survive: Mary, born in 1516. This early tragedy thus sowed the seeds of much of the later bitterness and injustice of the reign, focused as it was on the uncertainty of the succession, from the execution of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521 to the king’s numerous divorces and their fatal, at times momentous, consequences.